@NautArch Well, the spells do completely nullify certain issues entirely. They are very powerful non-combat options. Teleport allows you unlimited range across the world instant travel on a whim as an action. Resurrection restores body parts, and is the first revival spell that can do that. Mordenkainen's mansion is a near guaranteed safe long rest in any dungeon. Etherealness lets you effectively walk through walls and escape harm for 8 hours in many circumstances too.

I think the only thing that you're "missing" is that the spells can be extremely powerful non-combat options, or extremely powerful roleplaying opportunities. But if those opportunities don't come up in your game, then they are indeed underwhelming

@NautArch I believe so. Nothing in animate objects says you need to be on the same plane to control the objects

Ah, but etherealness says "While on the Ethereal Plane, you can only affect and be affected by other creatures on that plane."

And since animate objects turns the objects into creatures, I would wager that you couldn't affect them with commands

> I had a DM insist that we didn't notice an entire army of 30,000+ people charging our position for ~3 minutes without spot checks because the group was arguing about what to do whilst invisible.

I get being frustrated that your players aren't agreeing on what to do, but that was the wrong action to take. The rest of the campaign involved players performing arbitrary spot checks every five minutes and demanding the DM to describe what they see.

Well, hold on. Already the GM has prompted the players with new information. The players didn't have to actively get it, e.g. "Do we sense any nearby horror magic or hear any screams?" So in this scenario, that's somewhat fair.

Just jumping into this discussion, as a DM I like to use the listen/spot mods for my players as a general judge of what they notice as a general rule, with only detailed study/important things requiring spot/listen checks.

I don't indicate when they might want to do this, but I do put them in situations when it might be obvious.

For example, I might let them know there are three doors in the room period

Noticing important details about these doors requires them doing checks

But I can't seem to wrap my head around Occultist or Medium. Occultist seems like a big jumble of spell-like options and has its own complicated rule system for spell casting, and Medium has a weird mechanic that punishes players for using their class features.

@MaikoChikyu For ease of paperwork I'm going to be working less on the "massive empire" scale and more on "warring city-states" level. You'll still be ruling multiple towns/cities, but I don't want players having to try to handle 3,652 soldiers of this type, 2,134 soldiers of that type, 496 Priests of this type, 84 Priests of that time, 29 Engineers, etc.

The system will be modular enough to scale up, but the scale will still be a bit smaller since this is going to be pen-and-paper rather than computer calculated

Hi all o/ Hope it's not poor etiquette to pop in and ask a game-identification question? I'm looking for the name/id of a collaborative 'history-writing' game, probably indie-funded, span is broad (hundreds or thousands of years).

@NautArch The distinction being made there is that the spells are on both the class lists, raising a fresh doubt. So they're not dupes, though it's a very close thing. I'd already looked at it and went through that calculation. The answer is almost certainly no, but knowing the answer matches is necessary but insufficient for voting to dup; the questions have to match, with no possible distinctions. The key idea is that they have to be the very same question.

Second question (related, bit more of a long shot): there was a website (blog) linked to from a question on here that discussed building an open world for multiple groups to adventure in, All actions starts from a central city, etc. Not sure of my chances here, but any thoughts?

(the website discussed both, but google / rpg.se searches have been especially and maddeningly fruitless)

Belay that request, I think it was ars ludi (open world was West Marches, Microscope session was 'Flight of the Madamas'), thanks for stopping me from going crazy!

@SevenSidedDie On Board & Card Games we regularly have to re-explore the same concepts to answer very different questions. So for dozens of questions we'd re-explain how a certain facet of attack/defence works, but we'd be linking that back to saying "and so in your situation you get this outcome", and that always varies. Or sometimes it's the same outcome, but a different situation.

RPG.SE doesn't often have to re-explain the same fundamental issues, but that we do doesn't make it a duplicate.

@nitsua60 I think one key part of the difference in that Gorgon answer is that afroakuma was sourcing his primary corroboration to the nature of the Lamia and the Su-monster -- it would take a coincidence of cosmic scale for all three to just happen by coincidence in both books without connection.

In your iteration, primary attribution was given to Peterson's work, via a passage that didn't give attribution to anything specifically, which praise aside is a weaker corroboration (maybe he just read wikipedia)

@MaikoChikyu Lens in what sense? In this room we're usually using "lens" as shorthand for a perspective or paradigm. For example, the player's lens on a game is fundamentally different to the GM's lens, and a person playing Fate for the first time has a different lens to someone who's played Fate for years.

@NautArch Cheers, and no need to apologise. Some of the bits of this place are counter-intuitive…

@MaikoChikyu That's only when playing scenes. Scenes are the least common thing to happen during someone's turn. A player's turn is entirely the first sentence on page 20 (“Making History”). A scene is still one player's turn, and Lenses have nothing to do with how a scene works.

@MaikoChikyu The Lens isn't even the player who's currently taking their turn at Making History. The Lens is the player that started the round: they get two turns to Make History, starting and ending the round.

@NautArch There's still a certain amount of reading between the lines — but the need there is to read to what they are thinking and asking rather than into what we know would be the right question to ask. For example, even that wording would have different answers yet again, as Magic Initiate and such would become possible answers. It's not the core problem underlying the question.

It's a fine art, interpreting questions. I find the best practice for reading questions is editing messy ones: to manage an edit to clarify a question without changing its meaning involves laying hands on the meaning behind it with nuance and detailed consideration that's usually not triggered by just reading.

@NautArch I've more than once started to edit a question, got several minutes or longer into a revision, and then realised that I didn't properly understand the question, at least not enough to represent it faithfully with new words. It's… revelatory to run into that.

@NautArch Sometimes the asker will be responsive to questions to clarify what they're asking. Also, after a big edit I make it a rule to ask if the result is still asking the question they meant to ask; I've been wrong sometimes, but often they'll confirm it's accurate.

@MaikoChikyu Usually. They are more at risk of being poorly received, which is separate from whether they're on-topic. So when asking curiosity questions, making sure they're good questions is more important to avoid downvotes.

@Yuuki I explained what memes were to my daughter the other day, and she was horrified. I guess “pieces of information that are using our brains and culture to protect and reproduce themselves, by analogy to the way genes created cells and bodies as giant mecha to protect and reproduce themselves…” may have been too much a peek behind the metaphysical curtain.

@SevenSidedDie Absolutely! I was impressed a couple days ago when my kids were looking for holiday presents and at first I said that they shouldn't look or they won't get any. Followed it up later saying they're not here. My son (turns 6 in feb) said "but you said if we find them, we won't get them. SO they're here."

@nitsua60 Huh. It's not unusual to charge a table fee at places where the snacks & incidental sales don't justify the use of square feet anymore, but calling it a “cover charge” may be mishandled PR. Though I guess also any change is going to be seen as terribad by enough people.

@nitsua60 Sadly, even at those prices the margin on RPGs is nearly non-existent for stores. If they're typical, MtG literally pays their bills. It's an equation that makes it increasingly hard for stores to make a value proposition to RPGers that they can both afford and that is worth considering as RPGers. :/

The main room is lined with model vintage cars, used DVDs, obscure action figures, a life-like cat statue with rabbit fur, and a table of beat-up comics. Its main income is obviously trading cards. There are no dice beyond the standard cheap plastic d4/6/8/10/12/20, the D&D section seems to have been abandoned to its own devices a couple years ago, the miniature selection is minimal, odd, and exclusively plastic.

The last time I went to a game store was actually to buy MtG cards, and the time before that was to buy board games. I haven't bought RPGs or RPG supplies in a physical store for a long time, despite a ridiculous (and ridiculously-ever-expanding) collection.

I went to my FLGS a few times, but he never had anything I actually wanted. Like, I went to buy a lot of different-colored d6s for Don't Rest Your Head. He only sold white pipped ones individually and at a pretty high cost, and didn't have enough for my purposes anyway.

Even in a major city with several FLGS to choose from, there's not much for players who aren't doing Pathfinder or D&D 5e. There isn't nothing, but it doesn't make for a compulsion to regularly visit or even occasionally check in.

@NautArch I think you're missing the real power of Teleport, incidentally. You may not need it as a transport option, but a spell you can use in almost any circumstance to instantly get you and your entire party somewhere safe is more than a little handy.

My party avoided TPK twice using Word of Recall, which (for these purposes) is basically the same.